At the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC 2022) to be held in the United States in February next year, Korea was found to be achieving excellent results in semiconductor-related research, with 41 papers accepted, the largest number ever.

ISSCC held an online press conference on the 17th and announced that it will hold the 'ISSCC 2022 Conference' at the San Francisco Marriott Hotel in the United States for five days from February 20th to 24th next year.

The event will focus on intelligent semiconductors for a sustainable world, featuring complex digital/analog circuits for reducing power consumption, new machine learning hardware and various sensor systems based on them, as well as on- and off-network communication circuits that maintain the best performance while optimizing power consumption.

Additionally, power management circuit technology to increase system operating time and innovative circuit technology that is easy to recycle while being less affected by the manufacturing process will be introduced.

The keynote speech was given by Kang In-yeop, President of Samsung Electronics System LSI Business Division, who gave the talk titled 'The Art of Scaling: Distributed and Connected to Sustain the Golden Age of Computation'.

The corporate invitation conference will feature eight presentations, 34 technical sessions, six forums and six evening events.

At this event, 651 papers were submitted and 200 papers were accepted, with 41 papers from Korea accepted, the highest number ever.

Among them, Samsung ranked first among all institutions with 16 papers, and KAIST ranked first among all universities with 10 papers. A total of 9 institutions presented, including △Samsung Electronics (16), △KAIST (10), △Pohang University of Science and Technology (5), △SK Hynix (3), △UNIST (3), △Yonsei University (2), △Seoul National University (2), △Korea University (1), and △DGIST (1).

By technology division, Korea had the most papers accepted in IMMD (Imagers, MEMS, Medical and Displays) and MEM (Memory) divisions with 6 papers each, and TD (Technology Directions) and WLN (Wireline) with 1 paper each, reflecting the weak areas of domestic semiconductor research.

In the Q&A session held after the event announcement, questions and answers were exchanged about the current state of the domestic semiconductor industry, as well as crises and opportunities.

In the case of Samsung Electronics, the number of papers related to system semiconductors is increasing in addition to the memory field, and it was found that the company is encouraging ISSCC papers by considering the engineers' technical achievements and contributions to the industry.

In relation to electric vehicles, many GAN announcements are from China and Europe, and it has been reported that related papers have been submitted on attempts to use GAN devices to immediately reduce high voltages of hundreds of volts to 1 to 5 volts.

In addition, regarding automotive semiconductor research, it is a field that Samsung Electronics and others have recently placed importance on, and since stability is highly valued in the automobile industry, it is expected to take more than three times the development and testing time of general smartphone semiconductors. In the case of Samsung Electronics, it is reported that they are trying to lead the technology of battlefield semiconductors for a long time.

The wireline sector, which is responsible for input/output, is a research field that requires a lot of investment, and the technology gap compared to advanced countries is reportedly widening due to issues such as securing research funds. It was analyzed that it is the most vulnerable field in the domestic semiconductor industry and that active investment and fostering are urgently needed.